As a novel about a former soldier who deals with his postwar trauma by writing a novel of his own, The Sorrow of War explores the act of writing and its potential to be cathartic or therapeutic. Returning to Hanoi after fighting for the winning side of the Vietnam War, Kien has trouble putting the violence and horror of combat behind him, so he turns to writing. Of course, composing a novel about war isn’t necessarily the best way to forget about the experience, but that’s not why Kien writes the book—after all, it’s clearly impossible for him to forget the disturbing things he witnessed in his 10 years of combat. Rather than putting these memories out of his mind, though, he completely surrenders himself to them, intentionally reliving some of the most trying times of his life and writing them down in a frenzied state, as if the emerging novel has “its own logic” and “flow.” In doing so, he effectively refuses to hide from his own emotions. And though the process of writing about such difficult experiences is undoubtedly painful, it actually allows him to take a certain amount of ownership over his trauma. Instead of passively letting it eat away at him, he manages to assert a form of control over his sorrow by actively participating in it, even if doing so counterintuitively requires him to completely give himself over to it. In the end, he feels as if writing is a way to purge himself, thinking, “I must write! To rid myself of these devils, to put my tormented soul finally to rest […].” In the world of The Sorrow of War, then, writing has therapeutic effects not because it helps writers forget their troubles, but precisely because it forces them to face those troubles head-on.
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Coping Through Writing Quotes in The Sorrow of War
At the bottom of his heart he believes he exists on this earth to perform some unnamed heavenly duty. A task that is sacred and noble, but secret. He begins to believe that it is because of this heavenly duty that he had such a brief childhood and adolescence, then matured in time of war. The duty imposed on him in his first forty years a succession of suffering with very few joys. […]
The first time he had felt this secret force was not on the battlefield but in peacetime, on his postwar MIA missions gathering the remains of the dead. […]
From the time of that realization he felt that day by day his soul was gradually maturing, preparing for its task of fulfilling the sacred, heavenly duty of which the novel would become the earthly manifestation.
When starting this novel, the first in his life, he planned a postwar plot. He started by writing about the MIA Remains-Gathering Team, those about-to-be-demobilized soldiers on the verge of returning to ordinary civilian life.
But relentlessly, his pen disobeyed him. Each page revived one story of death after another and gradually the stories swirled back deep into the primitive jungles of war, quietly restoking his horrible furnace of war memories.
